The Kotel Lindens

When a uranium mine was proposed under the Podjestedi countryside, the campaign against it took these two limes as its emblem. In 2009 the country voted them Czech Tree of the Year, which is one way for a hamlet of a few houses to be heard. There are two trees standing a few metres apart on the field path at the edge of Kotel, and you look at them as one thing. The elder carries the local name Thousand-Year Lime: 970 centimetres round, 25 metres tall, its trunk split into three hollow stems that a single thick adventitious root has grown down through the middle to prop up. Its neighbour is the younger by some distance at 500 to 600 centimetres round and 23 metres tall. The headline age of about 950 years is the one repeated everywhere. The estimates that have actually been published run from 350 years to 1,100, and nothing narrows them, so the name is a claim rather than a count. Local tradition has the elder tree standing through a Hussite raid on the village in 1444 and the peasant unrest of 1680; that is village memory, not record. They have been protected since 1993, and safety work was carried out on the hollow stems around 2015. Blue and yellow trails reach them, over open ground with nothing to pay.